Hard Decision Decoding
Hard decision decoding associates the analog voltages representing the bits in each byte of a received data codeword with either a binary one or a binary zero value. Only the associated binary zeroes and ones are decoded, the actual received analog voltages (which may differ slightly from zero or one) being discarded. This process virtually ignores the varying degrees of resemblance to allowed symbols among the analog versions of the received bytes. The degree of such resemblance represents information regarding the reliability of each received byte, which information is lost in the hard decision decoding process.